Shoot 2025-02-07-204645 — philthompson.me

Birds
Mandel

Shoot 2025-02-07-204645

In recent days I was able to photograph (poorly) a pair of lifers: Canvasback and American Barn Owl.

The Canvasback was a tricky duck to pick out from among a couple hundred ducks, mostly because the Ruddy Duck has a similar bill profile from a distance, and because she kept diving down out of sight. On the walk out to the ponds I took a bunch of photos of a talkative perching Northern Harrier.

I also went out looking for Rough-legged Hawk a couple times. I came away with some shots of a Great Egret nabbing a rodent, possibly a pocket gopher, and also the Barn Owls. The Barn Owls were more easily viewed with binoculars. I don't expect to get better photos of one of those anytime soon.

My "birds in review" collages can be found here.

Signature

📄 hashes-2025-02-07-204645.txt

📄 hashes-2025-02-07-204645.txt.sig

The above hashes-<date>.txt file contains SHA-256 hashes of all the photos from this shoot. The hashes-<date>.txt.sig is a signature of that hashes file, created with my PGP key. The signature file itself was written to both the Bitcoin Cash and Algorand blockchains, in the OP RETURN and Note fields respectively, using the transactions below. In short, this proves that these photos and the signature both existed at the time the transactions were written to the Bitcoin Cash and Algorand blockchains. This blog post has more details.

view the BCH tx on blockchair.com: b545e2fa4b80bae65ad70c459a989d7b4de13740e83c4d2e9a96b2bb7cdd560c

view the ALGO tx on explorer.perawallet.app: XLIK7USHGMT7YHVIHSLTX724KBJ4F4X4MGARW7635O3KBWD2OG2A

Monday January 27, 2024

M31 Andromeda Galaxy

I again shot M31 Andromeda at f/3.5 on the EF 200 f/2.8 L II. This is a stack of the best 472 of 517 lights. Each light frame was an 18s exposure, so this image represents 1.97 hours of data. By previous best M31 image, from a recent gallery here and on astrobin, was made from 53 minutes of data. The extra hour did reduce noise, and since I took so many light frames and the galaxy was drifting a bit in the frame across the session, I figured I should try Siril's 2x drizzle feature. That did seem to help bring out even more fine detail in the image. After I make another post to astrobin I'll provide a link here for more details and a full-size image.